Twitter acquires social media sentiment tracker Gnip

Twitter has acquired Gnip a provider of aggregated social media content which is used by hedge funds, banks and signal providers to assess market sentiment and conduct analytics.

Gnip, Founded in 2008, has a four-year-old partnership with Twitter but also provides data for social media content on Tumblr, WordPress, Reddit, Instagram, and Foursquare.

In the financial sphere, the company has distribution deals with earnings platform Estimize and StockTwits, while its social data fire hose has been integrated with Streambase's complex event processing platform.

Boulder-based GNIP says the acqusition by Twitter will give the firm access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer more in-depth data and analysis.

In a statement, Twitter says: "We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface. Together we plan to offer more sophisticated data sets and better data enrichments, so that even more developers and businesses big and small around the world can drive innovation using the unique content that is shared on Twitter. With the help of Gnip's Boulder-based team, we will be extending our data platform - through Gnip and our existing public APIs - even further."